Ett löjets skimmer över vårt arma land

Jag har lovat att inte orda mer om de bedrövliga förtalskampanjer som riktas mot Tankesmedjan Wereds vådligheter, dess medarbetare och mig personligen och det är ett löfte jag tänker hålla. När denna smutsiga byk nu vädras i det senaste numret av TLS  (som också innehåller en brett upplagd essay om Karin Barbalander, välkänd för läsare av denna blogg, signerad James Hogg) vill jag dock ta tillfället i akt att uppmärksamma detta, inte minst som det så tydligt åskådliggör den drängstugumentalitet som utmärker den svenska "kulturdebatten".

Citatet nedan är hämtat från inledningen till Steven Dutch's insiktsfulla artikel med titeln Who writes Wered's Blog and Books?

 For sheer longevity, no conspiracy theory can match the notion that Kurt Wered has not written the numerous blog posts and books that have been attributed to him. His oeuvre contains too much accurate detail about current affairs, sports, homoeroticism, and the fine arts to have been written by someone of as low social standing as Wered, a former engineer at SAAB, goes one argument. His work displays too wide a range of style, goes another. Wered is hardly educated enough and Linkoping is too backward a place to have produced an intellectual of such caliber, goes a third. And so, almost every prominent public intellectual in Sweden has been suggested at one time or another as the author of one or more of Wered's texts: Sven Lindqvist, Crister Enander, Lars Gustafsson, Nikanor Teratologen, Erik Löfvendahl, to name a few.

Enander, a somewhat controversial critic, is a favorite candidate because of his connections with some of the authors published by Wered's "Anark Forlag".Considerable effort has also been wasted trying to find hidden ciphers and allusions in the texts of Wered that would prove them to be Enander's work. Why Enander, or anyone else, would be content to ghost write a blog which until recently attracted very few readers, and remain silent while it has begun receiving acclaim is a mystery the supporters of this baroque notion do not really address properly; it certainly does not fit the personalities of most Swedish critics.

I've seen the argument that writing blogs is considered a low-class occupation in Sweden, beneath the dignity of the public intellectual, or that the author needed to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals, but surely if Wered's brand of radical conservatism were on target enough to make such measures necessary, Swedish society would have been abuzz with speculation as to who the "real" author was. As it is, this seems to be an obsession of a fairly small but influential group of crackpots.